Feeling tired? It might be more than just a busy life.
Join us as we spotlight the importance of muscle health and the alarming trend of muscle decline in young people, plus essential tips to safeguard your strength.
And, from feel -good moments to extraordinary memories, we're bringing you the joy that brightened our week in Roundtable's happy place.
Coming to you live from Beijing, this is Roundtable.
I'm He Young. For today's program, I'm joined by Steve Hatherly and Yu Shen, first on today's show.
Have you ever felt that your body isn't as agile as it used to be?
If you're experiencing fatigue or balance issues, it may be time to consider the possibility of muscle loss.
Sarcopenia is no longer just an elderly concern.
It's affecting younger populations, too.
Let's discuss how to recognize these signs and the proactive steps we can take to maintain our strength and vitality.
So, what is – I have to say, this is the first time I've seen this word – Mm, for me, too.
Oh, good. A native speaker?
Yes. Echoing. And this is called sarcopenia, or jīrō jīng shǎo jīng in Chinese.
So, well, please take it away and explain what it is.
Oh, yeah. Sarcopenia is, well, a medical condition characterized by the loss of muscle mass and strength.
So it is mostly associated with aging, or the natural aging process of all human beings, but it can also occur due to various other factors such as lack of exercise and unbalanced nutrition intake.
So, in essence, sarcopenia is just a part of the muscle loss process of all – literally all of us.
But it's, you know, it's especially severe when it comes to people beyond the age of 60, and everyone loses muscle over time.
But people with sarcopenia lose it more quickly.
So that's why in, I think it's 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, aka the CDC, declared sarcopenia as an official disease, so that it can now be diagnosed and treated as a disease and can now be distinguished from other similar conditions.
And why we're talking about it is because, well, due to the high incidence and subtle onset of sarcopenia, Shanghai, as one of the most – as one of the cities with the largest elder population, has now launched a pilot program for screening elderly sarcopenia as a community level.
So it's establishing a sarcopenia detection network throughout the entire city of Shanghai.
And according to some of the action plans that came out in recent years, now – well, by 2025, more than 65 % of the grassroots medical institutions in Shanghai will have the capability to screen for sarcopenia among elder residents.
Yeah, this is a new word for me today.
Did you know that – did you know the word in Chinese, I'm wondering?
No. Had you heard of it before, right?
No, I don't think so.
It's a very unique thing.
I mean, I think that we know that you gradually lose your muscles as you get older.
I guess that's just kind of a common sense thing, but I didn't know there was a term for it, and I didn't know that it was defined as a condition.
So this is a great opportunity for a learning experience on Roundtable today for all of us.
So yeah, I was shocked to know that muscle mass typically declines beginning in your 30s, and then it continues to progress in your 60s and 70s.
But is that surprising to you?
I was surprised by that number, your 30s.
I thought it would have been later than that.
Well, for me, I kind of know that if you don't exercise enough and that you are not intaking enough proteins, then it's like your body is digesting itself in order to keep on fueling you for your daily lives and actions, or just anything that requires strength.
But this is also the first time for me to hear that sarcopenia or the losing of muscle mass as a condition for us.
So it can become a condition.
Yes. It's not necessarily something that everybody experiences, but I have to just come clean here.
And I have to say, because I'm not like a gym rat or somebody who's particularly into gym stuff anyway, disclaimer.
And I never understood the importance of muscle health period.
I used to think that, okay, muscles, you just acquire it.
As an average person, even without a workout, you would have some of it.
But for those, you know, gym enthusiasts, then they work on bodybuilding and that kind of thing.
So they have more accentuated and pronounced muscle builds, and sure, good for you.
But I never thought that gaining them or losing them as you age was a particular issue.
Just like when your hair grays, when you get older.
Sure, some people diet, some people just let it be.
I thought it was just part of the human aging process.
And it is. That's what doctors say.
Doctors say sarcopenia is a natural process.
And for those who are healthy and athletic, it might not be a major health issue at all.
You will, I suppose, inevitably lose some of your muscle mass as you get into your 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s.
But if you are active and if you are actively trying to maintain some of your muscle strength, then it won't be as pronounced is what they say.
The kind of decline, for example, for someone who's a lifelong jogger, a runner, they're not going to notice it as much as someone who has never really incorporated the gym or any kind of physical exercise into their lifestyle.
That makes sense, right?
Yeah. Interesting to know that women are more easily affected by sarcopenia than men, and there's a reason for it.
Biologically, men are easier.
It's easier for men to maintain muscle mass than women because of the increase of testosterone, the chemical in the body after puberty.
And plus, the basic muscle mass of women is lower than that of men.
And that makes sarcopenia more frequently found in women.
In fact, female muscle loss started much earlier than expected.
According to WebM Decompass, most people lose 3 to 5 percent of their lean muscles every 10 years after the age of 30.
You know why we tend to ignore the fact that we are losing muscle mass is because a lot of the symptoms of sarcopenia actually appear to be just fatigue or loss of strength or just feeling weakness in general or hard to recover your strength after an occasional workout.
So here's a quick self -check, everyone.
If you're experiencing the above, say, conditions or feelings and you're feeling tired or long -lasting fatigue on a daily basis, let's hope it's not the case for everyone.
But if you're experiencing it, it's likely that your body is going through sarcopenia or just general loss of muscle as well.
It doesn't necessarily mean that.
But some of those symptoms that you just described, it may mean that.
And you'll probably need to go to the doctor to figure it out.
Yeah, to for a diagnosis to be sure about it.
But you mentioned younger people now are dealing with sarcopenia and this is I guess the surprising news, because as we've been talking about thus far, it is kind of a natural part of the aging process.
But it's not something that we typically see in young people.
So what is it that's triggering sarcopenia among younger people these days?
The way I discovered about the fact that's triggering sarcopenia is mainly on the reduction of exercising volume.
So that's one of the major reasons that a lot of us are losing muscles or feeling exhausted in some cases.
And a World Health Organization or WHO study shows that in 2022, nearly 1 .8 billion adults in the world did not meet the physical exercise level that's recommended by the WHO.
And that accounts for about 31 percent of the global adult population.
And it's just shocking.
You know, and I did a bit further check on what are the recommended levels of daily workout or physical exercise for adults.
So according to WHO, for adults, at least 150 to 300 minutes of moderate aerobic activity per week is like a general level that's recommended for you to maintain a good health.
And for children and adolescents, that could be decreased to an average of 60 minutes per day.
So basically, I think it's easier for younger people to meet that, especially kids in school, because they have PE class to help them to get to that level, but to do like five hours of, you know, just general aerobic workout per week.
I think I'm not sure if everybody can meet it, but personally, I cannot.
I don't think most people can manage to do that.
This might have something to do with lifestyle changes these days, because you've got so many people cramped into cities and it's not news that, you know, when you just drive to work or however, get to work, spend eight hours at work, come home, and you're so tired and then, you know.
Yeah, you wake up and you do it again the next day, and then that just becomes life.
And that's the lifestyle that most of us live.
And I've had many personal trainers over the years, and I've learned a lot because not every personal trainer is exactly the same.
They have some different theories about things, but they do always seem to repeat some of the main points.
And the one that's always stuck with me is that when people go to the gym, they'll often do it because they have a very specific goal.
For example, they want to lose, you know, five kilograms or they want to gain three kilograms of muscle mass or something like that.
But the mistake that people make, if we can call it a mistake, is that the gym or exercise in general becomes something that you're doing as opposed to someone that you are, if that makes sense.
What they say, what the trainers say, is that you always have to try to get your mindset in that, oh, I'm not just going to the gym because, oh my gosh, I have to lose these five kilograms.
No, that's just, Ben, it's something that you're doing.
But if you don't think about it like that and you just think, it's just part of my daily routine, exercising is just part of me taking care of myself in terms of self -care, and then you don't really step on the scale as often to check whether you've gained or lost weight.
It's not a thing you're doing.
It's just part of your lifestyle.
And if you can get your mind that way, then that's a really big step towards just being a more active person in general.
The heaviest thing in the gym is its door.
That's very good. Also, I mean, since we're talking about incorporating these kind of routines into your lifestyle or making it part of you instead of just a temporary goal you're trying to meet, then there are plenty of people out there like myself, OK, I'm maybe more of the stingy type.
I refuse to pay for gym membership because I'm never going to get that money back, I know.
So therefore, I mean, for some of us who don't want to go to the gym, it's like the boringest place ever.
Of course, feel free to disagree because there are people who see it differently.
So I mean, in everyday life, let's say instead of taking the elevator and you take the stairs up and down and you might even time yourself a little bit and not so like hurry up and hurry down in the stairs cycle to work.
You know, there are plenty of other things to do, in my opinion, then just say go to the gym.
Yeah, it's true. But the danger is, is that if you're not doing those things because for a lot of people, they wake up, they'll walk to their car or they'll walk to the bus, then they'll walk from the bus to their office, sit in a chair for eight hours a day, nine, ten hours a day, walk back to the bus
and walk back home.
And that's it. That's the limit.
So if that's the case for so and it is the case for so many people and I'm not calling those people lazy, not not at all.
I'm just saying that it's very easy to forget that being active and moving your body and using your muscles is a really important thing.
And here's another thing the trainers said to me that really stuck with me.
When you are exercising, you are investing in your future self.
You're getting that immediate reward too.
But it's more important for your future because of the health benefits that will come later in your life and you can slow down things like sarcopenia.
Right. And we're seeing that out of the many reasons that contribute to either just not being aware of this muscle loss issue or sort of subconsciously contributing to you having it at some point is the unbalanced eating habits.
And this part, I think, will resonate with a lot of people because, well, Yushan, you're going to tell us what it is.
But a lot of people kind of follow this subconsciously in our minds.
And we thought it was healthy because nowadays, at least in the market or on social media, there are so many tags that's related to, say, light fasting or a clean diet where people just especially for younger women just take maybe a bowl of oatmeal plus yogurt as a meal and just take two meals a day.
And well, that might seem healthy in the short term, but in the long term, the insufficient protein and minerals and other important intakes of all the important things that build up our body will cause lasting effects on your especially on your muscle growth and in turn will cause muscle loss as well.
And nowadays people are so keen about getting to the ideal shape for women is typically to look more slimmer with maybe a curvy line on their body.
And some even go to plastic surgery or get some sort of injection.
I couldn't even name it in English to make their muscle look smoother, thinner in order to achieve that ideal shape.
And that plus the eating habit and everything could be one of the biggest reasons to make young women a larger group of victims for Sacropenia as well.
Yeah, sure. And we're not here to shame anyone or judge anyone who chooses cosmetic surgery.
That's if that's for you.
That's for you, of course.
But yeah, combined with the eating, eating habits, unhealthy, short term unhealthy eating habits that are disguised as healthy choices.
I mean, it's an it's such an easy mistake to make.
And I think we all make it from time to time.
Right. We want because we want that quick fix.
And also like if somebody wants to lose weight and if you focus on exercising, we probably all know by now it's just it's going to take a long time.
And then for somebody who wants to and maybe especially if we're talking about like obesity or, you know, severe health issues, then losing weight is maybe a must must do thing.
Then they will have to look at and really sort of regulate the diet.
And I think the problem is when a large proportion of the population.
For example, you're just on Shao Hongshu or any other social media site every day and then you're kind of you're you're in a way indoctrinated.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
By, you know, the kind of beauty standards that you Shen was referring to and and maybe to some extent, thanks to the prevalence of social media, our perception towards what's beautiful has actually narrowed in terms of options instead of expanded.
I see your point there.
Yeah. Because you're I think what you're saying is with more access to information, with more with seeing more people and what they're doing with their lifestyles.
Oh, well, then that gives me more choices.
But with the very, very, very strongly defined idea of beauty.
Yeah. And how do we achieve that?
How do we get there?
Yeah, then it makes it very narrow in terms of our selections.
And also when you look at the let's say, you know, these lifestyle bloggers or, you know, these key influencers on these lifestyle platforms and these days because anybody could just turn on the filter and with a lot of Photoshop and yeah.
And even with videos, it's easy to make people slimmer or sort of accentuate certain parts of the body, even in videos.
That's easily done.
So you're not even looking at the real thing anyway.
Yeah. But then as the viewer, we kind of just take it in and we think, oh, that is beautiful.
And also because it's so easy to do so many of these content creators, they are doing that.
So that also sort of responds to what I was trying to say just now that, you know, because we're bombarded by all this information every day and all these visual.
Stimulations every day.
Then yeah, like our our views towards beauty has been narrowed thanks to that in a way to.
Yeah. And some doctors have been concluded what have already concluded what we mentioned above.
So you come director from Department of Clinical Nutrition at Peking Union Medical College Hospital concluded during an interview that the lack of resistance training or weight training.
Lack of sunlight. Talking about the overly done sunscreen measurements that people take here in a lot of Asian countries that also the lack of intake of vitamin D and reduced consumption of red meat, which has a lot of protein due to fear of obesity among especially among younger women, I suppose, are common causes
of sarcopenia as well.
So, yeah, in general, this whole lifestyle affecting young people nowadays really reminds us how we view ideal body shape and how is general or stereotypical beauty standard affecting our way of living that's already bringing us consequences such as sarcopenia.
So what can we do? Well, from a younger age, yeah, I mean, use this information to your benefit with the knowledge that muscle mass will decrease.
Maybe eight to 10 percent every decade starting from your 30s.
Be aware of that. Try to make yourself more more active and maybe maybe try to get in the gym sometime if that's for you.
Now, here's another thing that we can do if we're looking at the older members of our family or if you're listening today and you're one of our older listeners and you're curious about how you can test your strength.
The hand grip test.
I'll give you a couple of things the doctors recommend the hand grip test.
What that does is it measures your your strength of your hand grip and it provides use to identify shortages in overall muscle strength in a hand grip test.
You can just do that by grabbing on to something as tightly as you can and then trying to see how long you can hold on to that.
Here's a more practical one.
The chair stand test.
This measures the number of times that you can stand and sit from a chair without the use of your arms in 30 seconds.
So very simple. Just stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down with no use of your arms.
And if you can do that quite comfortably within 30 seconds, then you don't have much to worry about.
And finally, there's a walking speed test as well.
This measures the time it takes you to travel about 13 feet or four meters at your usual walking pace.
So you can time yourself there and then maybe compare it on the Internet and see where you stand.
If you're curious to know right now, those are a couple of things you can do.
Oh, yeah. Because well, I heard that there are doctors suggesting that preventing muscle loss is a lifelong journey.
It doesn't just specifies as something for old people to practice and to do.
It's also for everyone of all different generations to be noted of the fact that, you know, the quality and dignity of your life in the older age has a lot to do with how much functional muscles you can still pull up by then.
So, yeah, definitely try out those tips and see if you're experiencing something likewise.
Could you just say a little bit more about why it's important to have more muscle when you're older?
Is it just that you're a bit stronger?
You don't fall easily like that.
Well, I mean, the falling part, sure.
It takes a lot of pressure off your joints.
When I go through phases where I'm not exercising, I had two knee surgeries when I was 19 years old and 22 years old, I think.
And surgeries, minor surgeries, when you're young, can lead to real pain when you get older.
When I don't go to the gym and my leg muscles get a little bit weaker, that puts more pressure on my knee joints because you don't have the muscles to take the pressure off.
So therefore I feel more knee pain when I'm going to the gym.
Zero, zero discomfort in my knees.
I'll give you another example.
A lot of people suffer from a bad lower back, right?
Lower back pain is really, really common for people all around the world.
When you go to the gym and you exercise your back muscles, that takes a lot of pressure off your lower back.
And if you exercise consistently and strengthen your back muscles, you'll find that lower back pain disappears.
Well, that's really useful information.
It is. And for average people, we see that at least, you know, Shanghai is taking the lead in this and trying to help people to screen, to raise awareness, and also providing assistance.
When this muscle loss problem really becomes an issue.
Yes. We've already talked about how they're trying to, you know, just push out this screening system or detection system all over Shanghai in grassroots medical institutions.
And also there are follow -up trackings for the old people's health status as well.
So after an elderly individual is found of being at risk of sarcopenia, there are follow -up trackings to make sure that enough.
Treatment and, you know, just daily reminders of nutrition intake is received for this elderly.
And also there are hospital clinics opening for treatment on sarcopenia as well.
So, yeah, in general, the system is quite sophisticated in Shanghai.
Oh, that's fantastic.
And also for younger people, I suppose maybe we can, you know, promote some kind of mind switch in a way, but this might even involve a change of heart in what's seen as beautiful.
So you're talking about you want to retain muscle mass when you're older.
Well, you need to have muscle when you're younger, too.
So that might mean, well, actually exercising and having these muscles is kind of a prized thing instead of the really skinny to trim to a, yeah, skinny sort of image, so to speak.
